Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday January 02, 2013 @06:34PM
from the now-robots-are-going-to-take-the-fun-jobs-too dept.

Trepidity writes "AI systems can (sort of) paint and compose classical music, but can they design games? Slashdot looked at the question a few years ago, and several research groups now have experimental systems that design board games and platformers with varying levels of success. I've put together a survey of the AI game designers I know of, to round up what they can do so far (and what they can't). Are there any others out there? 'Pell's METAGAME is, to my knowledge, the first published game generator. He defines a generative space of games more general than chess, which he calls "symmetric, chess-like games." They're encoded in a representation specific to this genre, which is also symmetric by construction. By symmetric I mean that mechanics are specified only from the perspective of one player, with the starting positions and rules that apply to the other player always being the mirror of the first player's. The rules themselves are represented in a game grammar, and generation is done by stochastically sampling from that grammar, along with some checks for basic game playability, and generative-parameter knobs to tweak some aspects of what's likely to be generated.'"

Yeah, that kind of procedural generation is also pretty interesting, but I think of it as a bit different. It's sometimes grouped under "procedural content generation" (PCG), i.e. the content of a game-world is generated: names, maps, etc. Even stuff like SpeedTree might go under that, since it procedurally generates, well, trees.

What I was trying to pull out here are systems that generate the rules or mechanics of the game, rather than the content. Admittedly the distinction can get hazy, because there's often some interdependency.